She took him upstairs to an enormous apartment with boarded up windows. There was one chair, and there were cushions on the floor for sleeping. Next to the fireplace was a pile of cardboard and wood. Ronnie put some boards in the fireplace and lit a match to a bit of the cardboard, which she stuffed into the hearth until she got a blaze going.
"Cook you some beans?" she said.
"That would be great."
Ronnie used a pair of tongs to hold the can of beans over the fire, after opening the can with an old fashioned can-opener, running it around the top of the can with surprising speed.
"Had to get used to this thing," she said. "Mama always used an electric can-opener."
Alex nodded. And as soon as the beans were heated, he accepted them gratefully. Ronnie handed him a Swiss Army knife with the fork extended, and he began to eat.
She watched him in silence. She was a pretty girl, in an appealing Mediterranean way. There was a toughness about her that was belied by her youth and soft features. She made Alex wish that he were twenty-odd years younger.
"It's great now that the colloids are gone, you know," she said. "I mean, I just ride my bike wherever I want. Hardly ever see anybody. When I do, I stop and talk to them, but they usually don't make any sense. You talked just like a normal person."
Alex grinned. "Don't let that fool you, Ronnie. I'm just as crazy as anybody else."
She looked at him warily.
He spoke quickly to reassure her. "Harmless, though."
"Yeah." Ronnie used the tongs to heat up a can of beans for herself. As she leaned forward over the fire, a scapular fell out of her fatigue jacket and dangled over the hearthstones. "I guess it doesn't make much difference anymore if you're crazy or not," she said. "It's enough to just be human."
"Ronnie, how did you survive all this time?"
"My Papa hid us first one place and then another, until he got infected. Then my Mama and I ran away from him so he wouldn't kill us. Mama got infected last summer. I been on my own ever since she died."
"I'm sorry." Alex hoped that she would never learn that her parents weren't dead, not completely. It was better to believe that they were in heaven, or even in hell.
"That's okay." Ronnie removed the can of beans. "I guess you must have lost somebody too."
"Yeah." He handed her the knife. "I lost everybody."
Ronnie sat cross-legged on the floor, eating. She stared at the fire, remembering.
"Look," said Alex, after a while, "I know where there are people who are putting together something. A family, kind of. Would you like to go and live there?"
She looked at him strangely. "It's not some kind of cult, or anything like that?"
"No, just a bunch of people who got tired of being alone, that's all."
"Are they hiding out in the underground? I almost got raped down there once, and never went back."
"No, there's nobody in the underground anymore. My people are in West Philly."
"Is that where you were headed when I found you? To join up with them?"
"Yeah. I left there yesterday . . . at least I think it was yesterday. Or it might have been the day before. I'm not really sure."
"What happened? Get hit on the head?"
Alex laughed. "Something like that."
"These people you're talking about," Ronnie asked. "Want me to drive you to them on my bike?"
"I'd appreciate it, Ronnie. But right now I think I ought to get some sleep."
"Just curl up over there." She gestured toward the cushions.
Alex set the Ingram on the floor, laid down on the cushions next to it, and closed his eyes. His entire body was so aching and tired that he could not get comfortable. He should have been able to fall asleep, but it wasn't working. He closed his eyes and tried to drift off, to no avail.
After a half hour of this or more, he rolled onto his side, and felt a gentle touch on his shoulder.
"Alex," Ronnie whispered. "Wake up."
Had she heard intruders? Had the infected returned? He detected no urgency in the girl's tone, be he heard nothing himself. What, then, was the trouble?
"Anything wrong?" he asked, reaching for the Ingram.
"I need to know something," Ronnie said. "That's all."
Alex's heart resumed beating at a nearly normal rate. There didn't seem to be any imminent danger.
"Will you hold me?" Ronnie asked in a child's voice. "It's been a long time since anybody's done that."
"Sure." Alex put his arms around her and her warm face pressed against his shoulder.
"My mom would of said this is a mortal sin, but I gotta tell you . . . "
Alex waited.
"See, I never knew what it was like to . . . I mean, I had a boyfriend, but we were only twelve, see. And he got sick. And then it was like just trying to survive. People were dying, and you couldn't get food and water, and colloids were everywhere. So I never learned about . . . you know."
Alex thought he knew what she was driving at. "And you want me to teach you? Is that it, Ronnie?"
She raised her little face so that she could look directly into his eyes. "Yeah, that's it."
He hugged her tightly. "You don't want an old fart like me."
"You said you lost everybody." There was distress in her voice. "Don't you like me?"
"Of course I like you. It's just that I'm old enough to be your father. My son would be almost your age now, if he had lived. It wouldn't be right, Ronnie."
He felt her hot tears soaking through his clothes. "I'll probably die before anybody makes love to me," she bawled.
"No, no. There are lots of young people around. I met one the other day who was only five or six years older than you, Ronnie. A lot more will come out of hiding now that the colloids are gone."
That seemed to calm Ronnie a little. "What happened to him? The guy you ran into, I mean?"
Alex shook his head. "He didn't make it."
"Young people never make it. I must be the only one left in the whole world." She started crying all over again.
"Oh, come on." It seemed to Alex that she was right, though. There did seem to be a preponderance of middle-aged and even elderly people still surviving. Perhaps it was simply because they had learned to be more cautious during their longer lives, or perhaps it was because the brains of the young tended to be healthier.
"Come back with me to my friends, and soon there'll be other young people joining us, I'm sure of it."
"Really?"
"Cross my heart."
Ronnie seemed to brighten a little. "Think maybe if I come back with you, I'll get a boyfriend, huh?"
"I know you will, Ronnie. Look, right now I've gotta get some sleep, though. I know it's early in the day, but I haven't had any rest for quite a while."
"I know. Sorry." Ronnie, her virginity still intact, extricated herself and left Alex to his dreams.
His dreams were not pleasant. He spiralled down to a shadowy place where armies of the infected marched endlessly through the night. In each of them was a thing that had come from a distant world, a thing that had no intention of letting him go until he was consumed.
Alex remembered a dream he had had while Jo was recovering from infection. He had been a viral cell, dormant, drifting through space. He had come to earth with billions of other cells, seeking the most advanced nervous systems on the planet.
He knew now that this had not been a mere dream. He had already been infected, the colloid driven from Jo's body into his. Even then, in the earliest stage of infection, its memories and his had become entwined. It had not shown itself while he was conscious, but while he was asleep . . .
But was he dreaming all this now? He was asleep, wasn't he? Strange images flickered across the insides of his eyelids, making him wonder what the vanquished colloid had left behind.
Was it possible that he still retained some vestige of the parasite's memory? Was he, in some indefinable way,
still
infected?
He fell through space, a long drifting descent through the cloudy atmosphere. This world's gases were almost ideal, and the sun's rays provided an adequate actinic exposure for the active seeking of sophisticated neurology. He felt himself awakening, already hunting, tumbling toward an unwary, bipedal creature who had never dreamed that such things could be . . . .
The biped's resistance was futile, and a new home was found amid the heat of its firing synapses. Its thought processes were complex enough to provide food, though much of it was ill suited to the purpose of its nervous system's invader. Social impulses were short-circuited, except for a rough herd instinct. The infected were easily programmed to attack the healthy.
Alex dreamed these things not as incidents, but as ideas, colored by the memories he had shared with the colloid. His own memories surfaced from time to time.
He entered a door and found a man being eaten by a colloid. The man resisted, half his face gone. He resisted until Alex shot him dead. Victor, and then Flash had resisted, and Alex had killed them. Jo was a Janus-faced entity who aided him on the one hand and worked against him on the other.
In the darkness, he ran from her. But as he moved through the terrain of his nightmares, he always found her just ahead. She was his beloved . . . and he feared her.
She embraced him, and he struggled, screaming in terror. But as her warmth enveloped him, he succumbed. And he knew that Jo was no longer the creature he had feared.
She released him and he lurched forward, falling . . .
And then he was awake. Late afternoon light streamed through the apartment's windows. The room was cold, but he was coated with his own sweat.
Ronnie was bending over him, stroking his forehead.
"You had a bad dream," she said.
It occurred to Alex that he might always have bad dreams from now on. He clung to the memory of Jo—the Jo he had known before her infection. The Jo who could never have led Flash to his death.
Alex bitterly remembered the remnant of Flash imprisoned inside a colloid, robbed once and for all of the defiant spirit that made him a unique human being.
Those swirling ghosts were not his loved ones, not anymore. He would go mad if he believed otherwise.
"Are you okay?" Ronnie asked.
"Yeah."
"Can I get you something?"
"No, I just want to go home."
Ronnie nodded. While he had slept, she doubtless had been thinking of what he had told her about the people at the armory. He wanted her to go with him, to be with other people.
"I'll get my stuff," she said.
An hour later they roared up to the big red doors of the armory, finding them wide open. Riquelme sat on a folding chair just inside with an M-16 propped against the jamb, warming himself at a fire in an iron drum, its smoke escaping from the entrance. He stared in disbelief as Alex got off the back of the chopper and walked toward him.
"Man," he said, getting up and bear-hugging Alex, "we thought you were dead."
"Not yet."
A woman Alex didn't know came out of the armory, and Riquelme said, "Liz, this is Alex." He turned back toward Alex, saying, "Liz joined us the morning after you disappeared."
"Glad to meet you, Liz."
Others were emerging from the depths of the armory, no longer afraid to come out in the open now that the colloids and the infected were gone. They gathered around Alex.
"It is the Prodigal," Samuel intoned, "returned from the land of the wicked."
Claire stood next to the cassocked prophet. She stepped forward and hugged Alex. "Welcome back," she said.
Alex said nothing until Jo appeared. She stayed back at the group's fringe for a moment, as if unsure that it was really him. Then she ran to him tearfully, embracing him with all of her renewed strength.
"You're alive," she said over and over again. "You're alive, you're alive, you're
alive!"
"Shaky, but still alive," Alex said. "I want you to meet a friend of mine." He turned to Ronnie and introduced her to the guerrillas. "I think she saved my life this morning."
"Let's go inside and talk," said the usually less than garrulous Elvin.
Everyone laughed at that, and though Elvin seemed puzzled by their mirthful reaction, he smiled a little, too. Alex, his arms around Jo and Ronnie, went inside the armory for the first time in days. Just how many days remained to be seen; he was almost afraid to ask how long he had been gone.
"We missed you, Alex," Polly said. "Where have you been all this time?"
"In hell." Overcome by emotion at this reunion with his friends—no, his family—he felt physically weak and exhausted, in spite of the food and sleep he had enjoyed earlier today. It would take more than a few hours to recover from the living death he had endured.
Alex had another bad dream, and as a result he awakened sometime during the night. The room, the CO's office outfitted with a cot, was still. He lay without moving for some time, staring at the ceiling. A sweaty film dampened his face and neck, moistening the pillow. The blanket was on the floor.
The nightmares would probably stay with him for some time. He was reminded of the years immediately following his military service, when he'd dreamed repeatedly that he was back in the Marine Corps, on his way to some unnamed desert combat zone, where he would surely die.
What if there were still some vestige of the colloid inside him? What if his victory had been nothing of the kind, but a ruse to make him infiltrate his own people once again?
He might never know . . . until it was too late.
Well, there was one person who might be able to help him learn the truth. He stretched his limbs and got out of bed gingerly, bumping around in the dark while he looked for his clothes.
Soon he was dressed and out in the corridor searching for Jo. The last time he remembered seeing her, she had been covering him with the blanket, just after she had washed his body with a damp cloth and dried him with a towel. He must have dropped off almost immediately after that.
Alex walked down to the big motor pool on the ground floor. He was amazed to see that nobody tended the front doors. They were closed, but appeared to be unlocked. A few days of peace had made the guerrillas very lax, it seemed.